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On arrival, we were overjoyed to find that a bevy of professional guides were willing and able to lug our kids around beastly displays without our assistance. With our hands untied, we were able to eat large quanties of fried chicken (the kids' parents always send food for teachers along with their prodigal offspring on field trips).

Anyway, Space Case Grace is in the younger class and she's nuts: she likes to run down the hallway and hide in cupboards as soon as the bell goes to begin classes. And she sits, cross-legged like an Indian and patient like Gandhi, under the table until I finally notice she's staring absently at my kneecaps. And we use a basic English book - Tiny Talk, it's called - and Grace has this thing where she scribbles black crayon all over the face of the cartoon Tiny Talk teacher. Poor Miss Dolly. A black face on every single page. The effect is sorta like that kid from The Ring. And Grace doesn't call me Chris teacher, or even song-sang-nim, like the other kids. She calls me apa, which means Daddy. But she doesn't especially like me. Uhh...

So she's pretty weird, but her mom plys the school with more free food than I've ever seen in my life. Boxes of donuts and barrels of strawberries. And I kinda dig the strange kids, because strange is where intrigue lives. Grace's favorite animal is a snake.

At one point, Mike kindly donated his skills as a White Person to one of the other groups for a photo-op. None of the other schools had a White Person, let alone four of them, so we tried to share ourselves. Despite the legit teachers' dubious sidelong glaces, as though we were going to feed their kids to the elephants, we got the job done. Hells yeah! And I managed to sneak the elephant at least four delicious children, whom he promptly devoured.

Anyway, I would like to take this fine elephant-penis opportunity to talk about how the average Korean will treat you if you happen to be an English-speaking foreigner. This only applies to open areas with large crowds - subways and stairwells and sewer tunnels are a different matter altogether. But shut the fuck up and here we go!

Old people: Old people will either ignore you, smile widely at you with no teeth, or start to rant maniacally to nobody in particular about how foreigners are disrespectful and in the good old days a brash sassypants whiteface would be getting paddled in the town square. I assume that's what they're muttering anyway. It's nothing good, that's for sure.

One teenaged girl: She will ignore you studiously. There is a 25% chance she will take a picture of your back with her cell phone.

A small group of teenaged girls: Giggle giggle giggle. Once you've walked past them, they will shout "Hello!" or "ILOVEYOU!" or some other stupid English thing at you. Then they will send ten billion text messages to their friends. If you try to have sex with them in the elephant pit, they will not appreciate it.

Small group of guys: They will either try to be badass and stare at you while muttering 'weigook' this and 'weigook' that, or they will be super over-the-top and scream "HELLO HOW ARE YOU I AM FINE THANK YOU SORRY SORRY SORRY!!!" Either way is an unsatisfying encounter.

Parents with small children: You will immediately be offered 50 000 won to teach their 8-month-old child some English.

Parents without small children: They will be pretty busy thinking about having a(nother) child. Or perhaps they are deep in discussion about love motels, specifically in regards to marital fidelity and Plato's perception of love as a non-physical act, especially not with a baseball card call-girl. Either way, they won't really notice you. Score!

Okay enough of this silly generalization-digression. We were at the zoo, weren't we, and our kids were protectively proud that we were getting so many teenaged idiots yelling parroted English our way. An associative disorder: they were holding hands with the sorta-maybe-cool foreigners who were being audibly greeted and gangbanged by the BIG KIDS and... well, I'm sure you can see how this works. I held way too many tiny hands: they jockeyed for position, grabbing and pulling and desperately clawing for handholds on my jacket and it was a TOTAL CHICK MAGNET for me. Or at least so I imagined, my actual import acquisition of chicks being rather fruitless. But at least I had a multitude of children attached to my clothing!

So we stumbled unevenly away from the street madness, ran to the dolphin and seal show. You know how this works too. The dolphins jumped and the seals balanced balls, but one seal sexy-danced his trainer in a manner definitely not rated G for General. And then came lunch, and the self-appointed hour for Chris teacher to hang back and smoke a cigarette with a surly camel. But pretty soon it was about time to run (in a line... always in a line!!!) back to the buses, exhausted and falling down and generally feeling like refugees from an Africa gone horribly wrong, an Africa where the beasts were boringly passive and the real wildlife roamed free, wielding hand phones and plaid uniforms and embryonic English.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH! SORRY SORRY SORRY!

Posted by Chris at 11:32 AM >> Commentations (3)